Abstract
This paper presents an immersive visualization of a taxonomy containing the most relevant words to describe the COVID-19 pandemic. In a hyper-informed world, people could feel frustrated when looking for news about a sensitive topic. Counterbalancing information overload involves offering reliable information to learn about a topic of interest in an engaging way. Our solution contributes to this end by providing a COVID taxonomy and an immersive visualization. To build the taxonomy, we involved an epidemiologist identifying the most meaningful words to describe the disease. The result is a hierarchical structure with sixty terms grouped into twelve categories representing symptoms, prevention measures, and treatments. The second contribution is a visualization designed to take advantage of the affordances of immersive spaces to improve the interaction with the information. The users can explore the taxonomy by interacting with terms and categories represented as connected spheres in a virtual world. To assess the experience, we involved 32 participants in a user engagement evaluation. The results show that the immersive space is an innovative and didactic way to understand a topic of interest.
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Acknowledgment
This work is supported by the project sense2MakeSense, funded by the Spanish State Agency of Research (PID2019-109388GB-I00), and the project IntCare-CM, funded by the regional government of the Community of Madrid.
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Onorati, T., Muñoz, C.B., Díaz, P., Aedo, I. (2023). Exploring the Affordances of Immersive Visualization Spaces: A Use Case About COVID-19. In: Bravo, J., Ochoa, S., Favela, J. (eds) Proceedings of the International Conference on Ubiquitous Computing & Ambient Intelligence (UCAmI 2022). UCAmI 2022. Lecture Notes in Networks and Systems, vol 594. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-21333-5_25
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